If you're wondering what the next trend in robotics is, look no farther than Video Friday to see what kinds of robots consistently end up in the news from week to week. Here's a hint: lately, it's been quadrotors. But as always, we have lots of other robots for you too. Lots of them.

Those cool little Linkbots from Barobo are sooo close to making it on Kickstarter. As of right now, they're just a little bit over 80 percent of the way to victory. To sweeten the deal, they've posted some new videos of the Linkbots doing cool stuff, including cracking locks and making a fantastic cat toy:

Robots are just way better at some things, and painting aircraft wings turns out to be one of those things. Boeing's new painting robots take a process that lasted hours and did it in minutes, with greater accuracy and higher quality.

ETH Zurich knows where it's at when it comes to flying machines. These next two videos popped up last week, and it's probably not a coincidence that Raffaello D'Andrea gave a talk at TED Global (which we've got for you later on). The first one features the Distributed Flying Array:

Another worthy Kickstarter that absolutely deserves your support is RoboRoach, a project which lets you hack into a live cockroach and turn it into a cyborg that you can steer with your phone over Bluetooth. Yeah, it's just about exactly as awesome as you're probably thinking it is:

$100 will get you a kit, and for $50 more, the kit will include a dozen happy little cockroaches. And we should note that they really will be happy, at least as long as you feed them and give them toys and stuff: the, um, modifications that you make to the little guys aren't harmful, and the electrical impulses that steer them aren't harmful either.